Lindsey

I know what it feels like to want to break your orbit and float like a satellite, wild in space, running the risk of disintegration. The desire to take your life into your own hands and hurl it at the stars… I understand the need for change and the desire to begin again.

The journey is always the best part.

When I was ten years old, I was a geeky girl with frizzy hair and that was the age were I realized that life could take huge turns influenced by minor choices. In fifth grade, I picked up a bass guitar for the first time and joined the school band.

When I was nineteen I picked up my bass again and played on stage for the first time with Mindless Self Indulgence, in front of over a thousand people. Which was also the night I puked behind the stage about twice because of post-concert jitters.

When I was twenty I met this boy and his voice sounded like something I wanted to hear over and over again. When I was twenty I took a picture with this boy and I wanted to ask for it but I never saw the photograph; I wish I did.

When I was twenty-four I moved to L.A, got submerged in a hazy city I didn't know and made a friends with someone with a beautiful voice I wanted to hear over and over again.

I'm getting used to the little things he does; past the point in friendship were every movement is a discovery. I know his smile more and the way it's lopsided, know the way he laughs quietly to himself when he finds something someone says funny. Seen how when he focuses on something, his face becomes blank and he doesn't notice anything going on around him. Know that when he's bored he pulls on his lower lip with his teeth and releases it, pulls and releases again.

Streetlamps cast shadows on my lap, shade him over and light me up. If I was by myself I'd be afraid to be in an empty parking lot; but I'm not alone.

I sit with my knees up against the glove box, my back deep into the seat. Our smoke hangs over us in a smoggy sheet, occasionally I bat it away from my face between drags. He sits in the driver's seat, elbow against the door and fingers splaying across his chin.

Sometimes I wonder if people notice the tiny details about me like I do them; if he notices me like I notice him. It's something I always do, notice the way people move and talk and breath and laugh and the way their eyes change. That's the way I get to know people, the way I connect. Maybe it sounds creepy, but it's not meant to be that way. It's just that I think it's the small things that puts a person together; what makes someone themselves.

“So you know, Mikey finally made it away from this girl and she's going nuts.” Gerard waves his hand around in a circle, bats smoke towards me. “She's banging on the door to our bus, screeching for him—all the while she's obviously tripping balls.”

My head falls back against the seat as I laugh, picturing that scenario in my head.

“We didn't even know what to do.” He grins, smoke seeps from between his teeth. “Mikey's freaking out from being grabbed like that as we're finally leaving—it was a shitty venue, too.” His voice trails off in thought. “I guess shitty venues have shitty people? Anyway, this chick won't stop banging and literally scratching the door, tryna get in like some kind of animal.”

“Groupies,” I shake my head, exhale gustily. “You gotta love it.”

“Yeah,” he laughs. “I like my fans but...ya know.”

We're silent for a moment as we both take a long drag. I glance at the clock—eleven o' clock.

I don't know how we got here—don't remember the transition from grabbing a 'quick coffee' at eight to sitting in an empty parking lot at eleven at night. His recording studio was right by an 'awesome cafe' which was kind of close to where I live which was really convenient, wasn't it?

Gerard is hard to read, but I think it's a date.

He switches through the radio stations, lingers on a station when Riders On The Storm comes fuzzily through. “The Doors,” he shakes his head. “My mom used to play them all the time; more often than not when I got home from school they'd be on.”

“Your mom liked The Doors, huh?” I flick the end of my cigarette with my nail.

“She stills does. She thinks Jim Morrison is romantic, and I can't deny that he was.” His voice is getting a hoarse tinge to it from all the cigarettes we've been smoking through, but he still lights another and passes it to me. “I wanted to play my music—Misfits, Smashing Pumpkins and the like—but she never let me play that stuff out loud around the house. Only The Doors.”

When we were drinking coffee I straight up told him I smoked a lot of cigarettes, and that he might as well know. To my surprise he was completely relieved; because then he could smoke around me as much as he wanted without having to try and be discreet about it. Him giving me this piece of information was followed by me asking him: you smoke? Great!

I take the cigarette from him, our fingers brush. “My mom loved The Carpenters, she played them a lot when I was growing up. Karen's voice is sort of...haunting. And beautiful, definitely beautiful. She'd sing her songs to me all the time,” I smile. Thinking of my mom brings mixed feelings, but it's memories like this that I try to remember.

I don't know that I'm staring at the ceiling and lost in my head until Gerard speaks up.

“It sounds like you're pretty fond of you mom, yeah?” He looks at me thoughtfully.

“Yeah,” I repeat, notice my cigarette is burning away between my fingers. “We were really close, because when I was a kid I didn't know my dad. So it was like, always girl time.” I place my cigarette between my lips. “Which is cool, except girls are bitches. She used to tell me all the things she said I needed to know when I was a woman, like what carbs are and to wear a push-up bra on the first date. Now, I just don't give a fuck about those things. I'm never going to tell my daughter what type of woman to be.”

He shakes his head. “My mom always wanted a daughter. God, me and Mikey put my mom through so much shit when we were kids. I think we probably aged her twenty years than her actual age; her having to raise two boys like that.”

I smile. “I feel sort of bad for her.”

“Now, I sort of think of her as a superhero or something.” He inattentively rubs his thumb over his lower lip. “She always supported what I wanted to do, even when I reached high school I was the weird kid that sang and played Peter Pan in the school play. She told me to do it because I wanted the part.”

“What about your dad?”

A distant shrug. “You know, I don't know.”

I raise the end of my cigarette in the air before putting it out on the ashtray between us. “Here's to shitty dads. The don't got nothing on us.”

He laughs, stabs his besides mine. “You're different, Lindsey.”

“I guess so.” I lay my head back down again. I'm getting tired; beginning to feel sleepy and slow. The constant inhaling and exhaling, along with the low voices we've been talking in is beginning to affect me.

Gerard has his eyes closed, chin in his hand and cigarette in the other. “Na, na, na, na, na...” He pulls his knees up closer to his chest. “Na, na...”

I open my eyes a crack, glance at him from the corners of my eyes.

“Drugs, gimme drugs.” Despite how the chain smoking has made his voice husky, it still sounds good. “...gimme drugs.”

“I don't need it, but I'll sell what you got.” I whisper. “Take the cash and I'll keep it...”

“Don't stop,” he tells me, without even opening his eyes. “Eight legs to the wall...” He continues.

“Hit the gas, kill em' all.” I stare at the ceiling. “And we crawl.”

“And we crawl, and we crawl, and we crawl...crawl.” He opens his eyes, his crooked smile starts on one side of his mouth and then pulls the other side up. “I think we made a song.”

“It's a short song, than.” I turn my head towards him and raise my eyebrows.

“I gotta write that down.” He reaches down the floor, reaching around for his phone which had slipped down there when he had curled up in the seat. I watch him sleepily type down the words on his phone, I smile at his attempt.

“Do it.”

“What was your line?”

“'I don't need it, but I'll sell what you got. Take the cash and I'll keep it.'”

“Eight legs to the wall,” he mutters to himself. “Hit the gas, kill them all.”

“Then the crawling part.” We're out of cigarettes by now, and my throat is dry. “That's all I got; my brain is shot. I can't think of anything else to add.”

“We should make it longer.” He glances up from his phone. “We could write an actual song.”

“You think?”

“Have you ever written a song before?”

“Sort of, I guess.”

“Maybe we can—geeees, it's getting late. I thought it was nine or something.” A surprised look crosses his face; and that was when I realized how distracted Gerard Way is half the time.

“You gonna keep me forever or drop me off home?”

“I dunno, you seem to be good at free-styling.”

“Maybe I'll help you finish it; our song.”

He turns the keys in the ignition, stretches his arms as his car rumbles. “We can call it 'Na, na, na.'”

“Sounds good to me.”

My apartment is only about ten minutes or so away, we spend that time in companionable silence, switching through the radio in turn. Eventually we find a song we agree on, and gradually my eyelids get heavy enough that I have to close them.

As we pull up outside my apartment, he turns to me. “Lindsey?”

“Yes?” I open my eyes, and get startled by one of his fingers lightly swipe across my cheek.

“You had an eyelash.” His face is close to mine, close enough that I can see the cracks in his lips and his eyes glance up at me from beneath thick eyelashes. My chest thuds, the insides of my wrists feel like they're pulsing with the sudden rise of my heartbeat.

In reflex, my fingers curl into his chest and I lean in tentatively to his advance.

“Oops.” He breathes out airily between slightly parted lips, words reflecting it to be a mistake but voice hinting no regret. “My bad.”

I wrap my fingers in his shirt and pull him back to me, press my mouth firmly against his again; telling myself I only want to see if this second kiss is as good as the one I had only a moment earlier. When it's even better I allow him to come in closer, let him wrap an arm around my waist as my fingers get tangled in his hair.

He tastes like cigarettes.

There's no pause after that, one of his hands meet mine on his shoulder and our fingers intertwine. We're almost motionless, my back pressed against the car door and his torso leaning over mine. My head bumps the window, I don't even notice. I'm barely breathing because instead of inhaling I'm pressing my mouth back against his when there's even a slight give.

I've always been open to the unexpected.

The radio station we were listening to is breaking up between two different stations; a newscaster's voice cuts through a Green Day song. The static sound mingling with the two different voices rolls around with the chaos inside my head. Everything seems still when we stop, all I can hear is those noises crashing in my head.

“I'm kind of out of practice.” He murmurs, gently letting go of my hand and sliding his other off of my lower back. In the dim lighting from the streetlamp outside the car, I can barely detect a faint coloring in his cheeks.

Awkwardly, I untangle my hand from his hair. I feel like I'm rouge colored from the roots of my hair to the tips of my toes. “I think I fixed that.”

He sits back, rubs his hand down his face. “Damn,” he says in awe.

I chuckle, lean across the seat and peck him on the cheek before opening my door to let myself out.

“I better see you again.” He shakes his head.

“We still have to finish our song.” I reassure him.

This was the best night I had with him before things took a turn.

Notes

i've got big plans for the story yeah-uh